ONLY IN BFLO The 40-ounce heard ’round the world By Kevin Purdy Illustration by J. P.Thimot. As a memorable, attention-getting title, “Malt Liquor and Marijuana: Factors in Their Concurrent Versus Separate Use” doesn’t quite measure up to Eat, Pray, Love or Love in the Time of Cholera. But researchers at the University at Buffalo working under that rubric have received more national attention than they could possibly need. It all started when U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a “Stimulus Checkup” report in December 2009. In it, the senators cited 100 projects receiving funding under the Recovery Act—funding the senators claim had been “wasted, mismanaged, or directed towards silly and short-sighted projects.” The heading for number 19: “Buffalo Residents Paid to Keep Daily Journal of Malt Liquor and Marijuana Use ($389,357).” Upon its first release, the report generated media calls from local television stations and the Syracuse Post-Standard. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-NY) press office also called, but only because it was receiving a sudden rush of calls itself. On a wider but quieter level, the study would be cited for months to come in national wire stories, political columns, and editorials across the country. In other words, “Buffalo” is now indelibly tied to “malt liquor” and “marijuana” in the Google-verse. The basic facts of the headlines—money paid for reporting malt liquor and marijuana use—are true, but it’s far from the whole story. Dr. R. Lorraine Collins, a professor of health behavior and associate dean for research at the University at Buffalo’s School of Public Health and Health Professions, points out that, in her twenty-odd years of research projects at UB, she’s had far juicier subjects and grant applications. “We’ve looked at excessive drinking in young people, high-risk behaviors and dependency, sexual activity, tobacco use,” Collins says. She admits her research into “physical activity and marijuana use” might have made for even easier humor points, but calmly explains that it actually looked into whether increased physical activity could decrease marijuana use, not the far more likely inverse. Malt liquor wasn’t a new topic for the professor either. She’d published her research on young adult malt liquor drinkers in 2007, but was looking to follow up an angle that arose during data gathering. “More than half of our [malt liquor] sample was using marijuana on a regular basis,” Collins notes. “There isn’t a lot of research on malt liquor drinkers themselves, and we wanted to find out when users were using the two substances together … to study the dynamics of that particular substance abuse, and see where we might intervene.” So Collins applied to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for what was originally intended to be a four-year study. After learning that the stimulus bill could result in more approvals for shorter-term studies, she pitched a two-year version of her study. Out of the $8.2 billion the NIH received out of the $787 billion Recovery Act, Collins’s study picked up $389,357. With that money, she is paying about 100 participants to call in every day for three weeks with the details of their last twenty-four hours of malt liquor and marijuana use. Of particular interest, she says, are the people around the subject when they’re using. “When people use substances, more often than not, there are people they use them with—their buddy, their significant other, people at a party or something like a party,” Collins notes. “If we can figure out more about those situations, it can provide useful information for interventions. What if we could learn to work with both parts of the ‘team’ that’s causing the use?” Given the Obama administration’s intent on appearing open about its spending, and the political climate, you can say this study is a departure from Collins’s usual routines at UB’s South Campus. At a basic level, her results and other aspects of the study—even her own e-mail address—will be made public on a National Institutes of Health site as she approaches completion. And while professors are accustomed to periodically justifying their theories and efforts to department heads and publications, Collins’s work received a very public picking-over before the first forty-ounce bottle made it into the books. “For what it’s worth, my own independent research, also performed in a university setting, confirms the finding that drinking malt liquor and smoking pot renders a subject more likely to report negative consequences of substance use, particularly the following morning,” quipped Stephen F. Hayes, a columnist for conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, in its May issue. Hayes also offered first-person assessments of the appeal of chocolate éclairs, Peter Tosh, and Scooby Doo reruns under marijuana’s sway. Blogs such as the Moonage Political Webdream debated the specifics of malt liquor and marijuana pricing, as well as questioning other limitations of intoxicant study. “Now, I went to college. I tried real hard to get drunk eighty-seven straight times … After a point it just gets tedious,” the unnamed author wrote. The phone calls stopped long ago, but, on and off, you’ll still find pundits and bloggers taking Buffalo’s own little piece of the stimulus to task. Some of the reporting is simply calling into a number, or being called by a machine, and entering numbers corresponding with substance use. It’s intensive, sensitive questioning, and it results in a whole lot of data being collected. Collins has a staff of three full-time researchers, including a project director with a Ph.D. in social psychology, and one more part-timer. Collins doesn’t feel compelled to justify her research in raw cents-on-the-dollar returns for the NIH investment, but does note that keeping three and a half salaries funded in Buffalo, including her own, has the same kind of ripple effect so often noted in stories about factory layoffs. So, would she ever again put “Malt Liquor and Marijuana” in an application title? Collins admits to being “a little more gun shy” about her wording, but doesn’t regret her time in the national, satirical limelight. “We have to study these controversial topics, because if we don’t understand what most often puts young men at risk, there are problems and risky behavior that are going to get worse,” Collins says. “This is what I do.” Kevin Purdy writes for a number of national publications and is contributing editor at Lifehacker.com. 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